Hola todos...I am officially back home now!  I took pictures with the kids and got some really cute ones :)  I'll miss them, they were great.  Friday night, my last night, a group of us went out...we got to meet up with the guys we met in Tamarindo too, so that was really fun.  I'll miss all the friends I met during my time there lots...it's too bad everyone lives so far away!  Saturday I packed up and waited to go to the airport.  My first flight left 30-40 minutes late, so I had less than an hour to get through immigration and customs, re-check my bag, and get through security again!  I got to my second flight with about 20 minutes to spare.  My luggage didn't make the trip though...but it arrived today so not too bad!  Good to see everyone again.

Also I'm already experiencing a bit of reverse culture shock...when I go to the bathroom I still feel like I'm doing something wrong when I throw the toilet paper in the toilet haha...and it's great to eat some different kinds of food too! 

All in all, a successful experience I'd say...adios Costa Rica, y pura vida!

Hola todos!  Yesterday with the kiddos we made little paper dolls where they could decorate them with clothes, eyes, hair, etc. and they turned out really good.  After that we played with balloons again (back by popular demand) and also had some small board games to play with them like tic tac toe and chutes and ladders, but miniature.  I felt bad when we left cause one of the little kids didn't want us to leave and he was crying as he was waving good-bye.  Poor little guy!  On the bus on the way back we saw a ton of people coming out of a church, and then figured out it was a funeral procession when we saw the hearse, and lots of people walking along behind it through the streets.  Que triste.  :( 

Today the daycare was closed because they had an annual conference to attend in San Jose.  So I slept in a little bit, went to the gym, and did most of my shopping for all of you guys!  I think you will like all your presents...!  I gave some food and money to a few homeless people too, because I would always pass them every day on my way to work and I feel like I know them now...a small difference, but still something.

I'm going to miss speaking Spanish haha...I just don't want to lose what I've gained here!
Tomorrow will be the last day with the kids and I'm going to try to take pictures with them too.  Going home is bittersweet!
Hasta el sabado...Mama y Brian, les vere en el aeropuerto!

Hola todos!  I’m officially done teaching at Carmelo now that the school is on vacation during my last week here.  The goodbye was uneventful, but I got my teacher’s e-mail so we can all keep in touch.  The kids were really sweet and said, “we’ll miss you!”  but I’m sure now they’re enjoying their break too. 

Friday we headed out to Tamarindo, it’s a beach on the far side of the northern peninsula—so pretty far, the bus took about 6 hours.  When we arrived, we started walking around to find a hostel and ran into some Maximo people that had come a day before us, and so we stayed the same place as them and it was really nice.  We had our own Maximo group, plus a girl the other Maximo people had met and introduced to us, plus 3 people from our bus that decided to stay with us too, so we had a nice little group to hang out with.  Tamarindo is kind of like Jaco in that it’s a little more developed and has more of a nightlife, like a little more touristy than other places.  Friday night we all went out…it’s really nice cause there’s always a bar that has some kind of deal for the girls (aka free drinks) so it works out really well when we don’t have to spend lots of money!  Afterwards on the way home we ran out on the beach but sadly no one wanted to go swimming…hehe.

Saturday we headed out to the beach.  It was SO pretty…the beach was really big and wide and not very crowded, and the water was shallow really far out and soft sand and everything.  And, the water was the calmest I’ve experienced yet in an ocean—smaller waves and not very strong.  It was so nice cause it was super hot so the water was great.  After a while a few of us joined a game of frisbee on the beach…I was in heaven.  I think at that moment, I might have been the happiest person on earth.  (Sidenote to Brian and anyone else who’s interested: I wanna play frisbee when I get back…ahh I miss it!)  Sadly we had to leave the game to go eat lunch (silly food gettin in the way of my activities).  After food we looked around the shops on the way home and headed back to the hostel.  At night we went out again to a different place and danced and got into all kinds of shenanigans…haha. 

On the way back to the hostel we passed by a really nice hotel (definitely far out of our price range), which we noticed had a lovely pool with fountains and everything…it looked rather inviting, so we strolled in and helped ourselves…hehe.  It felt awesome, and no one questioned us—probably the only time looking like rich Americans worked in our favor.  All was lovely until we noticed everyone else was wearing wristbands, then I felt really self conscious haha.  But I didn’t feel that bad, cause it was a little bit of luxury for us after all the rest of our time here being…well, less than luxury.  So for one afternoon I experienced the rich people tourist side of Costa Rica!  It was really pretty and we had a great time.

Sunday we headed back out to the beach aaand…SURFED!  Ahh it was SO much fun.  It was better to learn here because the water was so much calmer.  I’m so glad we did it.  It was a lot easier than I thought it’d be, I think because of all the previous water sport experience (thanks Ozarks!).  Everyone told me I looked like I could be in the movie Blue Crush haha so I guess I looked like I knew what I was doing, even though I ate it a few times pretty good too.  However, the sun was very intense and the surfing kinda did me in…I got a lil crispy.  I’m not red though, but it did hurt for a bit!  I can’t even remember the last time I got burnt enough for it to hurt…oops.  Anyways I felt super cool bein a surfer for a little bit and now I’m sad we don’t have surfing anywhere remotely close to home.  The surfing instructors kind of have a reputation of being creepy but our instructor was awesome and really nice so I had so much fun and didn’t want to leave...probably would’ve stayed out there all day if I could!  (Although my skin is probably glad that didn’t happen).  Sadly we only had about an hour and a half cause we had to catch our bus home.  But it was a great workout and I slept a lot on the bus!  So all in all, a fantastic last weekend trip to end my time here.

When we got back home, we had 4 new roommates.  One girl who’s been here a couple weeks and was moving houses, and 3 older people—a teacher, and a couple from Canada.  I feel smart again because they don’t know much Spanish so I do some translating sometimes too.  I feel really lucky that I’ve had awesome roommates during my time here (and by roommates I mean people who are actually in my room, not just my house).  They’ve all been close in age to me and are good friends now.  And I’ve been lucky to have an amazing host family too!  Good food, good people, good experience.

Happy (belated) 4^th of July to everyone back home!  Save me some fireworks!  I wore red, white and blue during the day to be patriotic and last night a big group of people went out to the bars here to celebrate.  There were actually quite a few people out for a Monday night so it was really fun.  We danced the night away and one of the bars had the movie Independence Day playing…we may have even done a U-S-A chant at some point…(but a little bit discreetly so everyone didn’t hate us).  You meet some interesting characters going out…like the man who, after telling me he was 30 years old, asked for my phone number (no), my e-mail (no), and was so drunk he kept repeating himself over and over until I finally just walked away after trying to escape like 10 times.  It’s funny too cause when you’re out a lot of times guys will say, “hello,” as if that one English word is going to draw you to them or something haha.  Sometimes I wish people (people meaning natives) would just speak in Spanish because I can understand them better than trying to figure out their English accents!

My new volunteer placement is a daycare called Rayito de Luz.  It’s about an hour away, except we have to take more buses and they’re more expensive haha so I’m glad I’m only going for a few days!  The kids are really cute and sweet, but also very active and I’m always exhausted when we leave.  I’m definitely happy I wasn’t doing this the whole time—it’s not too structured so we just play with them, but it’s not too bad cause there’s a big group of volunteers there and not too  many kids.  Most of the kids are like 3-6 years old, with a few older and younger than that.  It’s sad though because when the person from Maximo was showing us around on our first day he said that it’s a poor neighborhood, and most of the kids live with a single mom and lots of siblings, and not the greatest home situations…abuse of all types is common.  I don’t know the kids’ individual stories but they seem just like happy, normal kids.  They’re pretty funny though—one of the girls was teaching me a new word and I guess I wasn’t saying it right because the other girl sitting next to us calmly explained to her, “it’s because she’s from another country so she can’t say it like us” hahaha so they are used to all the volunteers messing up their language and lucky for us, they still talk to us all the time!  So it’s fun—they love it when we spin them around, and I already got a drawing from the first day from one of the kids.  The daycare itself could use some help though…they have a lot of random (probably donated) toys, and the outside area has some play equipment but it’s a little sad looking…most of it is probably too small for the kids, and the swingset simply doesn’t have swings on it.  But today we played with balloons, and sure enough, that entertained them for hours!  So they are really cute and while they wear me out, it’s a little sad I won’t have much time to get to know them and all.

My time is now winding down here…while I am ready to have some comforts of home, I will miss some things about both places!  Besides the people and the places, I think I will really miss speaking Spanish.  It’s so convenient that I am surrounded by people here who understand when I speak but at home it’s just not the same!  While there are places to speak Spanish, I won’t have this good of an environment for it (like where people know that I’m learning and are patient, I get personal instruction, etc.)…I just don’t want to lose what I’ve gained during my time here.  Hasta el sabado…chao!

Some of my 4th graders at Carmelo

The hotel / pool we crashed

Yet another postcard moment...

Basically, I'm a pro.

Hola todos!  I had an AMAZING weekend at Tortuguero.  Saturday morning, before we left, we lost power at home because there was a storm and a tree fell on the transformer or something.  So I was glad I was leaving because that meant no hot water or anything!  We took a bus to Cariari, then switched buses to get to the port where we could take a boat to Tortuguero.  We quickly discovered that our second bus had AIR CONDITIONING, and it suddenly became the most magical, luxurious bus I’ve ever been on (but really, there is no air conditioning most places because everything is open air).  The boat we took was about the size and shape of a school bus, a little boat (very different from the giant ferry we took to Montezuma).  We wound through this river in the jungle…well, everything here looks like jungle…then arrived in Tortuguero, a small little town on the Caribbean coast.  We stayed at a hotel and had our own room (more luxury!) and our own bathroom and shower (by now we felt like royalty) and it was just really nice and cute and the people that owned it were really nice too.  Saturday we mostly just chilled in the hammocks and read our books, walked on the beach (black sand!) and just relaxed.  We tried to save some money by cooking food ourselves in the communal kitchen…it was good but we had to improvise a little bit because it wasn’t fully equipped with everything you might need…how do you strain your spaghetti when you don’t have hot pads or a strainer?  Answer: a towel to hold the pot and a plate to strain the water.  Oh yeah and I don’t trust the fruit from these tiny little grocery stores anymore…I ate an apple and when I got to the center it was rotten and black inside…yummy.  And it’s not the first time it’s happened, either—we bought moldy granola bars in Montezuma…I really think they just don’t have enough business to keep the food moving along, so it just sits there forever until someone buys it.  That’s my theory anyways.

Sunday was a long but adventure-filled day.  We got up early to go on a canoe tour on the river.  It rained all day so it wasn’t ideal beach time.  It was a light rain but after about 3 hours we were very wet/hungry/tired when we got back, but it was pretty cool.  We saw lizards, iguanas, some exotic birds that I don’t know the names of, toucans, and 2 types of monkeys.  It was cool too because we got to weave back into the little rivers that ran through the jungle so it felt like we were pioneers or explorers or something.  During the day we just napped and read in the hammocks again—rough life, I know.  (Sidenote to dad: we must get a hammock, they are the best things ever.  Hang it between the 2 poles of the thing where the hot tub used to be, or the front of the nest). 

Now, Sunday night: this is the part that ranks up in my favorite things.  We went on a turtle tour, because if you visit Tortuguero, you better see some turtles!  The tours are at night because that’s when they come out to build their nests.  Lucky for us, we are in turtle season now.  So our group walked along the beach at night, and it was pitch dark out but SO pretty because of the sky—there were more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life…I couldn’t stop looking up but then I’d trip over something on the beach so it was kinda hard to look and walk at the same time haha.  So anyways it was super dark, except you can see the white of the water and the dark shapes of people around you.  The guides find the turtles and we go watch them build their nests.  We got to see 2 different turtles, both Green turtles and they were HUGE.  Between the two of them, we saw them laying eggs, covering up the hole, camouflaging the nest, and returning to the ocean.  

It’s really cool too because they take steps to make sure we’re disturbing the turtle as little as possible.  We have to be quiet on the beach, you can’t take pictures, and the guides use a red light so show them to us because the red light doesn’t disturb them.  Also, there were people from an organization that works in turtle conservation, and they were measuring and tagging the turtles so they could keep track of them (they are endangered).  It’s sad because we learned that only 1 or 2 turtles of every 1,000 eggs laid will actually survive.  They have lots of predators that eat them or people who collect the eggs to sell them as food.  So they are in danger in the nest (they are in there 2 months before they’re born), on the trip towards the ocean once they’re born, and once they’re in the ocean they have bigger fish waiting for them.  So the moms lay a LOT of eggs because of the low survival rate...I think the guide said almost 200 in one nest.

So they dig a very deep hole in the sand, then drop their eggs in, then cover the hole, then use their flippers to fling the sand around to camouflage the nest.  Then they (slowly) make their way back to the ocean and disappear.  It looked like a lot of work.  It takes about 2 hours to complete the whole process.  Anyways, it was one of the coolest things I’ve seen and I’m so glad we went…definitely one of the highlights of the trip, ranking up there with the waterfall!

Sunday we had a beautiful sunny day, so we had a couple hours of beach time before we headed back.  The ocean there was so strange, the water flowed in every direction…like there were waves going sideways and every direction all the time, like it looked like a boat had just come through and made a bunch of waves, except it was like that all the time.  It was really fun though.  Oh yeah I forgot to say on Saturday when we arrived and were walking on the beach, there were some kids playing and they ran up to us and gave us some shells (interesting because most of the beaches really don’t have shells), and then a little later we were just sitting on the beach and they ran up with a bunch of flowers and put them in our hair and stuff.  They were really cute!

And to top off a perfect weekend, on the boat ride home we saw a crocodile!  I was so excited cause I was hoping to see one but hadn’t yet, then I got to see one right as we were leaving.  It was just laying on the bank, didn’t appear to be too interested in our boat…good thing, because we were really low in the water and he would’ve had no problem hopping in!

So all in all, we had an awesome weekend!  I only have a few days left of teaching at my school, then the kids go on vacation so I imagine I’ll be doing something else for a few days before I head home.  I’ll miss them, they’re pretty cute!  I’m gonna try and take pictures with them tomorrow.  Nos vemos todos pronto!   

The river boats to Tortuguero

Navigating the river in a canoe--front row seat!

My artistic beach footprint shot

Part of my beach photoshoot...sometimes I am easily entertained

The CROC

Hola todos!  Just a quick update before I leave for the weekend...

Teaching at school is still good, although sometimes frustrating.  Now that my time here is nearing an end, I'm starting to get sad when I think about the things and people that I'll miss when I leave!  So I'll try to soak everything in while I can with the time I have left.

Wednesday at school was really fun because they had a soccer tournament.  We all walked over to a gym a couple blocks away, and they played several games, like 1st grade vs. 2nd grade, 3rd grade vs. 4th grade, etc.  It was fun to watch because I knew the kids playing and it was cute seeing how excited they were.

Thursday they had a concert at the school.  There were 2 guys playing trumpets and I think some students played music too but I didn't get to see all of it cause I had to leave.  But I heard the students practicing before the concert and they played "Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day...it was actually pretty good haha but they played it for the longest time...it was like an hour long song, but not too bad!

We're leaving tomorrow (Saturday) for Tortuguero, and will probably stay til Monday.  Hopefully we'll see some turtles!  I'll let you all know how it goes next week...

See you all in exactly 2 weeks from tomorrow!
Pura vida :)

Hola todos!  This past weekend one other girl and I went to Jaco.  It's the closest beach to San Jose.  My travel group is shrinking a lot because all my friends have gone home and the new people go to the same places we've already been.  But oh well.  Several people told me before we went that Jaco wasn't that great, that it was dirty and just not nice.  And after being there, I say: I disagree 100%!

So I went with low expectations, but instead I was pleasantly surprised.  It's a small little town with lots of shops, and apparently a tourist destination because we saw a lot of (white) families and kids and stuff.  The hostel we stayed in wasn't that great, but it was right down the street from the beach.  When we went Friday it was in the afternoon so the waves were really big and it was kinda cloudy.  Oh yeah -- there was this guy who worked on the beach selling surf lessons, and after I told him I didn't want to surf like 10 times, he proceeded to follow us to where we were sitting, talk to us for awhile, then when we had nothing left to say (aka I was ignoring him) he continued to just sit right next to us, for about 5 full minutes...not talking...just sitting...it was suuuper awkward and I just wanted to be like, "ok, you can go now..." So he finally left, but found us again the next day and I pretended to be asleep so I didn't have to talk to him.  So creepy and annoying.

Besides that, the beach was great.  It had soft sand even in the water, and the water wasn't as strong as other places so we could actually swim without being knocked over, so that was lots of fun.  We went in the morning on Saturday so it was quieter and calmer.  We had great weather Saturday morning (it usually rains in the afternoons) so we got lots of sun.  Friday we went to town and shopped...I found a tank top that I'd been looking for so I was happy, and then we got ice cream and contemplated goin out but we're pretty much senior citizens when it comes to bedtimes now, cause we're tired at like 8:30!  Probably because we're all used to the sleep schedule now, go to bed early and get up early!  So anyways, we were boring and just went to bed.

Saturday we headed back because Maximo was having their monthly international party.  It was really fun and I made lots of tico friends because most of them were the English students at Maximo, and their teachers.  After the Maximo party ended we all went out to the bars and it was super fun.  And, as it turns out, when you add alcohol, everyone's second language abilities improve haha!  So it was a crazy night and pretty entertaining. 

Sunday was really boring because I stayed home and all my roommates were gone because they were still on their weekend trips.  So I slept in, and was going to go to the pool in the afternoon (apparently there's a pool here, I haven't found it yet) but it started raining so that plan failed.  Anyways it was lonely!  I had been planning to stay home my last weekend to explore downtown and do my shopping, but after stayin home one day I don't want to do that anymore, and besides I'll have time to do all that before I go in like one day.

I have my last week here free because my school goes on break, so there's no classes.  I wanted to travel a little further but don't know if that's gonna happen cause it's hard to find someone to go with because they all still have their volunteer stuff during the week.  So I think I'll end up traveling part of the week with someone, then coming back and maybe I'll see about doing a different placement just for a couple days.  I just know I'll need something to do cause sitting at home is super boring!

Soooo that's all I can think of for now...everything else is going well!  I miss home!  But I know the time will go by fast and then I'll be at home for 2 days and be bored again haha.  Ciao :)

Hola todos!  I have officially passed the halfway mark of my time here.  One day last week while I was walking home from volunteering, we heard drums playing…at first I just thought it was street performers playing drums, but as we got closer and I saw all the people, it was actually a parade!  It was the anniversary of a school and they had a band (hence the drums), people on stilts, banners, and on down the road they had set up tents with information inside.  I don’t know what was in them because the other volunteers I work with are boring so we just kept walking instead of exploring.  Oh well.

We decided to go to Montezuma this past weekend.  There were only 3 of us, and we were kinda wingin it, cause we didn’t really plan anything except that we wanted to go and what time to meet up to leave.  It was fun not knowing what I was doing, but it was a looong trip there.  We left early Friday morning and took a taxi to the bus station, then started the trip on a good note when we found out we were at the wrong bus station.  So then we took another taxi to the right bus station, waited an hour for it to leave, then rode it to Puntarenas on the coast.  Then we had to take another taxi to get to where you buy tickets for the ferry.  Then we waited 2 hours for the ferry to leave, then took the ferry for a little over an hour.  Once we arrived in Paquera (that’s where the ferry landed) we took another 2 buses to finally arrive in Montezuma.  So.  It took us pretty much all day to get there.  But the journey was an adventure!  We had a basic outline of how we needed to get there, but we were pretty much just like asking people along the way where to go haha. 

I made a friend on the ferry.  There was this little girl (she was 2) from the family who was sitting next to us, and she eventually wandered over to where we were sitting and kinda leaned on my leg, then proceeded to stare at me for a good 10 minutes.  Like never looking away, just staring.  She was really cute and it was pretty funny watching her…so I felt pretty popular for about the last 15 minutes of the ride.  When the ferry docked in Paquera I felt like we were being dropped off for an episode of Survivor…there was nothing there except a small port to dock the boat.  It was all jungle, mountain, and nothingness. 

Montezuma was definitely a different type of place than we’d been before.  It was a really quiet small town, kinda quaint.  It’s not tourist-y like some of the other places.  We kept joking that we were roughing it cause it was all like dirt roads and stuff.  We walked down the road till we found our hotel, Hotel Lucy…supposedly it was the first hotel that was in the town.  It was cute, pretty similar to the hostels we’ve been staying in.  Except it didn’t have hot water or mirrors…terrifying, I know!  Nah really it was fine because it was SUPER hot the whole time so I would just keep jumping in the cold shower to cool off.  Our hotel was right on the beach too so I liked that we could always hear the ocean and stuff. 

The first night we ate at a restaurant that showed a free movie with dinner, so that was cool.  It was on a projector screen and we watched “The King’s Speech.”  Saturday we went to the beach for a few hours.  The water was VERY strong though, probably the strongest I’ve experienced so far, but here there were huge waves and they didn’t break until right at the edge of the shore…so swimming wasn’t much of an option, unless you could make it past the waves…I passed.  I was just walking along the shore and the water would wash up and almost knock me over!  We’d only been laying out on the beach a short while when I suddenly heard water rushing closer and closer…I jumped up in time to grab my purse—the important things!—to save everything in it that couldn’t get wet, like my camera and money and stuff.  But everything else got soaked.  So I guess I kind of underestimated how far the water would come up!  But the good news is, it was so hot that my towel dried really fast. 

Later that afternoon Becca and I decided to take a walk down the street to see what we could find.  We passed a small sign on the side of the road that said “Montezuma Waterfall Trail” and below it, a lovely warning that said many people had died there because it was dangerous and blah blah blah, so then we really wanted to check it out haha.  So we follow the trail and it comes out on a river, with lots of rocks and kind of like mini waterfalls.  So we followed it up for about 20 minutes, climbing over the rocks and trees and everything, kind of making our own path, until we found the big mama waterfall at the end!  It was really pretty and I was happy we found it on our own, without having to pay to get in like the last waterfall we went to!  So that was really fun and took up some time since we didn’t really have any activities planned.

Later that night after dinner we went back to the same restaurant we’d been at the night before to get milkshakes, and we had the same waiter that we’d had the night before, and when I ordered my shake he said, “ok, but only because you have pretty eyes!” haha he was really nice though.  Oh and I forgot to say when we ate breakfast on Saturday there were these birds that would swoop down and steal the bread from the empty tables, and one of them landed right behind me so I was keepin an eye on it so he didn't try to attack my food!  And there was a big iguana that climbed a tree right behind us...so we really felt like we were living in the jungle.

Sunday morning we got up early to head home…the trip home wasn’t as long or as haphazard as the trip there though.  We had to wait about an hour for the ferry to leave, and the bus back to San Jose was perfect timing because it left as soon as we got on.  Before the ferry left they loaded on a bunch of cars, including a full sized bus, a huge truck of bananas, and a truck with a bunch of cows in the trailer!  So it was a pretty sizable boat.  But I think there were cockroaches on it. Ew.  Anyways we got back to San Jose in the early afternoon so it wasn’t too bad.  Montezuma really isn’t that far away, but it was just all the transportation and waiting in between that took so long!

I’m not sure yet what we’ll be doing this weekend.  We have two new girls living with us, so now we have 6 girls upstairs and one downstairs.  The roommates change all the time so we’ll see what happens this week. 

What’s everyone doing back home?  Miss you all, and see you in less than a month now!

My classroom at Carmelo

Hotel Lucy (Montezuma)

On the way to the waterfall

Found it!

Bye bye, Montezuma